LAHAINA, Hawaii — They say you learn more from losing than you do from winning, but at this moment, no one is trying to hear that. John Beilein is incensed. Wide-eyed, red-faced. “Listen to their locker room,” he barks at 13 silent faces. He scribbles rapidly on a dry-erase board, drawing some semblance of a basketball court. “Charles, where are you going on this play?” He stares daggers through Charles Matthews, Michigan’s budding star sophomore.

“I learned something about my team tonight,” he continues. “I have to call a timeout because we still have guys who don’t know where they’re going.”

On the other side of a temporary partition inside Lahaina Civic Center, LSU is whooping it up. The Tigers, a rebuilding program team that lost 17 of its final 18 games a year ago, are celebrating a dramatic back-and-forth 77-75 win over Michigan, a program coming off a Sweet 16 appearance. The Wolverines fumbled a nine-point lead on Monday with five minutes remaining. With a chance to win, Beilein called a play for Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman to catch an in-bound, turn up floor, run off a screen from Moritz Wagner and attack the middle of the floor with Matthews and Duncan Robinson hauling ass down the wings to opposite corners. Instead, Matthews attempted to retrieve the in-bound, putting himself out of position, and forced Abdur-Rahkman to dribble up the sideline into a thicket of defenders. The play was blown. Michigan didn’t call a timeout. Abdur-Rahkman forced a bad shot. U-M lost.

Beilein seethes silently, then changes his tone.

“OK, we’re gonna learn from this,” he says. “We’re gonna get better.”

Change is coming. There will be a shakeup in the starting lineup, some agonizing film study and non-stop work. It’s still early in the 2017-18 season and Michigan is about 4,500 miles from home. A trip to paradise is proving to be a mirror of reality. Outside the team charter bus, a staff member leans over and tells a visitor, “It’s going to be an interesting 24 hours for you around here.”

In the low glow of blue lights lining the ceiling of the bus, assistant coach DeAndre Haynes realizes he’ll be using a scouting report he didn’t expect to need. The staff did heavy prep work on No. 13 Notre Dame, what would’ve been a marquee matchup had the Wolverines beaten LSU. Now that's trashed. Instead, it will be Chaminade, a Division II program that serves as host of the Maui Invitational. Michigan didn’t come all this way to play a game that won’t count on the final win-loss record, but here they are. It’s approaching 9 p.m. on the island — 2 a.m. back east — and the staff is beginning prep for a 3 p.m. tipoff against the little-known Silverswords.

Words dissolve into whispers. Most Michigan players are wearing headphones and thumbing through iPhones. The front of the bus stirs, faint voices asking what kind of defense Chaminade plays and what time team meals should be scheduled for. Michigan is a program known for Beilein’s meticulousness and the reputation unfolds as we go.

The bus arrives at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort. All-encompassing film work begins immediately. Assistant coach Luke Yaklich, the defensive specialist, starts cutting clips from the loss to LSU. He rubs his forehead. Michigan allowed the Tigers to make 12-of-15 2-point baskets in the second half of the game. They attacked U-M’s ball-screen defense all night, dialing up mismatches on Robinson.

The staff is in the Lahaina ballroom, an airy space filled with tables wrapped in floral tablecloths. Heads are buried in laptops as a buffet goes untouched. Yaklich receives a text message from Moritz Wagner. He reads it aloud: “I can’t have that many defensive plays where I say would, coulda, shoulda. I need to be a better leader.” Yaklich finds room for a smile. “Love that kid,” he says.

Twenty minutes pass before Beilein arrives. Glasses on the bridge of his nose, he holds a folder with the preliminary Chaminade scouting report in one hand and the stat sheet from the LSU game in the other. “Gonna be tough to bounce back after that,” he says to no one in particular. U-M players soon walk in one by one, flipping lids open on food warmers. There’s some small talk, nothing more. As they eat, coaches eyeball more film. Beilein begins watching 32 clips of Chaminade. Over the next few hours, they will condense all the film into a tidy package to present to the team in the morning. Beilein says to make sure to include some good clips. “They need some positive reinforcement,” he says.

Beilein and strength coach Jon Sanderson walk over to address the team. Full attention. They detail what the players will eat and when they will eat it, when they will sleep and when they will rise. Oatmeal and cereal at 9:30 a.m., a full brunch at 11 a.m. Beilein itemizes the next day hour by hour.

By 11 p.m. local time (4 a.m. ET), players are off to bed and the coaches are breaking down Chaminade’s 1-4 ball-screen. “Today the issue wasn’t getting posted up, the issue was a guard shooting it over our four man or beating him off the bounce,” Beilein says. “This is a different deal. We’re worried about this guy just getting buckets underneath on Eli (Brooks) or Zavier (Simpson) or whoever. So on the high-low feed, can we squeeze off the corners? The guy who will be in the corner, what’s his shooting percentage?”

On it goes like this until Beilein asks video coordinator Bryan Smothers if all the footage he wants is on his laptop. It is, indeed, and Beilein leaves his staff to finish up. Haynes, Yaklich and Saddi Washington continue working on their respective scouts. They’ll remain in the ballroom for another half-hour. On the walk to the elevator, Beilein says he hopes for five hours of sleep or so. He also has a passing thought.

“You know, I’m starting to find that we just flow better with Eli.”

He’ll end up thinking more and more about Eli Brooks in the coming hours.

Beilein looks on from the sidelines during the Wolverines' loss to LSU on Monday in the Maui Invitational. (Photo: Brian Spurlock/USA TODAY Sports)

I ’ve covered Michigan basketball for five seasons. In that time, the ultimate test has been distinguishing between what’s merely the inter-workings of a basketball team and what amounts to illusory folktales. The program’s reputation is laden with accounts of Beilein’s finicky neuroses and obsessive attention to detail. It’s an environment that has managed to provide a springboard for many, but also worn thin on others. Above all, it’s one that’s whistle clean and that's won a lot of games. The reputation isn’t a stigma as much as it’s a mystery. The No. 1 question I hear from outside coaches and media is, “What’s Beilein like?” and, “How does it work?”

All along, I’ve known the program as an autocratic ecosystem, but been unsure of how the dials turn and how Beilein’s plan goes from idea to execution day to day. When an idea to spend 24 hours inside the program walls was accepted, that, more than anything, was what I wanted to see. I wanted to write about how the program operated, not about Beilein. Problem is, Beilein is a barber pole and the program is the stripe. Everything revolves around his decision-making.

It’s 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday and the coffee is flowing. The table is covered in MacBook Pros. Most of the staff has been up since 6 a.m. HT, finishing the breakdown on LSU and prepping the Chaminade scout for the day’s film session and walk-through. Beilein already spent the day's early hours re-watching the previous night’s loss, plusChaminade’s loss to Notre Dame. In the ballroom, he flips through clip after clip, rehearsing what he’ll later tell the team. He's watching offensive clips — Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind — when, out of nowhere, he pops his head up, speaking to everyone, and no one, all at once.

“So who do we start at the point today?” he says, looking around. Eyes raise around the room. Michigan’s efforts to replace Derrick Walton Jr. have resulted in a three-man battle between Brooks, an under-the radar freshman from Pennsylvania; Jaaron Simmons, a graduate transfer from Ohio; and Zavier Simpson, the one-time heir apparent to Walton. Entering the preseason, common sense figured that Simmons, the most experienced of the three, would win the job. That didn’t happen and Beilein instead opted to go with Simpson as the starter. Through four games, though, Simpson is still making mistakes that the staff has repeatedly addressed.

All of the assistants look back at Beilein and finally Haynes speaks. The 33-year-old was a former standout point guard at Kent State. He notes that he was once benched for a freshman. “I think about when I played, I was playing shitty and Jordan Mincy came in and they started him over me, and that fueled me,” he says.

“It got your attention,” Washington interjected.

“It got my attention,” Haynes repeated. “It was a freshman starting over a senior and it made me play harder. I think if we start Eli, it will open their eyes up.”

Consensus builds around the room. Brooks played 12 second-half minutes the prior night and turned the offense in a different direction. Despite being four games into his college career, he understands what Michigan is doing on both sides of the floor better than Simpson and Simmons. Moreover, Beilein needs a point guard who can shoot in order to stay sane and Brooks, more so than the others, offers an outside threat.

That’s the extent of the conversation. The decision is made without Beilein saying the decision is made. Now they discuss defense and conclude that, while this team is smart, it’s not smart enough — not yet. Players aren't identifying the right switch at the right time. One illuminating tidbit this morning is that Michigan bases its switching patterns not on opposing personnel, but on opposing offensive sets.

“We can’t learn everything today, but we can learn what we can learn,” Beilein says.

To watch film with Michigan basketball is to watch a French film with Italian subtitles. What you can discern is total guesswork. And it's probably wrong.

U-M players, though, sit attentively, locked in on a projection screen in front of the room. Beilein tells them the film is going to hurt, but he is not trying to call anyone out. Down go the lights and up comes the footage from the loss to LSU. Busted assignments are diagrammed. Beilein sits in the front of the room with his back to the team and his eyes straight ahead.

“This is not winning basketball,” Beilein says, clapping to every syllable. “You see what’s happening in the game, you recognize shooters. You see that you’re up by six and there’s three minutes to go and we’ve got two veterans right now that are just, like, in la la land. I’m not playing the freshmen yet because I think they’re going to make these mistakes.”

The clips roll on as Beilein speaks uninterrupted for 30 minutes. The dialogue is mostly nonsense to an outsider. There’s talk of Rockets, Irish cuts, Spiders, Pistols, Rudys, Horns, Barry Larkins, a Floppy into a Fade, 44s, Oklahomas and Pearl Harbors. Michigan basketball has its own language, but you don't need translation when the film speaks loud and clear. The team sees Matthews alligator-arm a loose ball that turned into two points the other way. “How’d that work out for you?” Beilein says. They see Jon Teske swat a clean block, but get whistled for a foul — a left hand on the opponent’s hip. “Tell me when you’re going to stop doing this, Jon, so that I know when to play you more,” Beilein says. The session ends with a series of positive plays. “Good, good, good,” Beilein says.

At 10:30 a.m., four-and-a-half hours from tipoff, prep work turns to Chaminade. Defensive assignments are divvied up and a change in the starting lineup is announced. Brooks is in. Simpson is out. Neither flinches. The change is not mentioned again for the remainder of the day.

The walk-through starts at 11. A mockup half court is taped onto the meeting room carpet. Beilein puts everyone in position, talking at warp speed. All the Wolverines nod along. “Pistol side double eyeball,” he says, as the orchestra moves in front of him. The Wolverines are prepping for Chaminade as if the Silverswords are the Golden State Warriors. After simulating Chaminade’s actions, Beilein gives a player-by-player breakdown of the Silverswords' roster, including their back history and tendencies. At 11:30, he presents his players with fast facts — an amalgamation of all the info dispersed in the last 90 minutes. Each player reads one section out loud.

Simpson leads the team in a prayer before lunch — one of four times they’ll pray together today. Coaches and players go their separate ways. It’s 12:06 p.m.

“Six minutes late,” Beilein says, glancing at his watch. “Dammit.”

Beilein sits alone in the Michigan locker room prior to Tuesday's game against Chaminade in the Maui Invitational. (Photo: Brendan Quinn)

Back on the bus, Michigan is loaded up again and heading down the Honoapiilani Highway to the Lahaina Civic Center. Out the west side, the Pacific rolls endlessly over the horizon. To the east, the peaks of Pu'u Kukui carve through an indigo sky. It’s easy to forget to look around.

By 2:30 p.m., all of the information compiled on Chaminade in the last 24 hours is now concisely bullet-pointed on a dry-erase board. Beilein rattles through scouting reports, player by player, off the top of his head, once again. Then each assistant speaks to the players. Haynes talks about playing for each other. Washington’s theme is connectivity and effort. Yaklich, the loudest, taps into the Japanese proverb of falling down seven times and getting up eight.

The team prays. The team takes the floor.

As the makeshift locker room empties, Beilein withdraws to a corner and reaches into a pocket. He has the same small book that his mother kept on the nightstand at their old family home just north of Buffalo. “My Daily Bread” is a collection of short reflections on spiritual life written in 1954 by Father Anthony Paone, a Jesuit priest. Beilein's indispensable copy is filled with keepsakes and notes, shoved between pages, including the prayer card from Josephine Beilein’s 2000 funeral.

“Sometimes I need to stop and clear my mind,” he says.

Even though everything has a process, in the end, it’s still personal.

Two hours later, Michigan returns to the locker room hopping and bopping like shadows off a campfire. Robinson was out there hunting for shots, making four 3-pointers. Matthews out-athlete’d everyone on the floor, pumping in 22 points. Abdur-Rahkman added 17. Brooks? He played OK, earning an easy win in his first start. Michigan waxed Chaminade, 102-64. Even though there was an all-consuming game plan, it was never a game.

There isn’t much time for a postgame talk. “Pack it up,” Beilein says, looking at his watch. It’s just after 5 p.m. Beilein says he wants players in cold tubs by 6 and back in the ballroom by 6:30. It’s a big game against VCU at noon on Thursday. There’s work to be done. There’s film to be studied. There are another 24 hours ahead.

Brendan F. Quinn covers Michigan and Michigan State basketball for The Athletic Detroit. He comes to The Athletic from MLive Media Group, where he covered the Wolverines since 2014 and, additionally, the Spartans since 2016. Prior to that, he covered Tennessee basketball for the Knoxville News Sentinel and was a columnist for Basketball Times. Follow Brendan on Twitter @BFQuinn.